Drug overdoses among people aged 10 to 18 more than doubled in the United States between 2019 and 2021, according to a study released Thursday by health authorities, who warned in particular of the risks of counterfeit pills containing fentanyl.

The average monthly rate of overdose among adolescents increased by 109 percent between 2019 and 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said.

And the number of overdoses involving illegally manufactured fentanyl increased by 182 percent.

However, illicit drug use among adolescents was down overall during the same period, suggesting that the rise in deaths was likely caused by more potent drugs rather than more frequent usage, the study said.

Fentanyl, an ultra-potent and addictive synthetic opiate, is easy to produce at low cost in the labo

ratory, and the drug has flooded the American market over recent years.

According to the study, around a quarter of adolescent overdoses were linked to counterfeit pills, often sold under the guise of Oxycodone, a painkiller, or Alprazolam, an anxiety drug often known by the brand name Xanax.

Explosion in US adolescent overdoses, mainly fentanyl

A “waiting list crisis” among heroin users seeking methadone in rural areas underlines the need for nurses to be allowed to prescribe the drug, a leading addiction expert has said.

Dr Peter Kelly, assistant professor in mental health nursing at Trinity College Dublin, described as “extremely frustrating” the ongoing resistance within the Department of Health to nurses prescribing methadone, despite 14 years of campaigning and widespread use of the practice across other EU states and the UK.

He is urging the newly appointed Minister of State for drugs, Hildegarde Naughton, to urgently review a decision by her predecessor Frank Feighan that there was “no objective need for the introduction of nurse prescribing of opiate substitution therapy (OST)”. Mr Feighan stated this in a letter to Dr Kelly last month.

The Oireachtas Justice Committee last month urged an “evaluation of the role that non-medical prescribers could play in treating opioid addiction in Ireland, by increasing access to OST”. Other advocates for nurse prescription of OST include the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP) and the drugs users’ group, Service Users Rights in Action (Suria).

Ireland: Methadone should be prescribed by nurses to cut long wait times

A research study on Afghan Women and the Opiate Trade was launched by the Afghan Opiate Trade Project (AOTP) at CRIMJUST, Border Management Branch, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The report provides a unique insight into the role of Afghan women in the opiate trade in Afghanistan.

For nearly two decades, Afghanistan has been the major source of the world’s illicit opium production. Opiates produced in Afghanistan impact governance and economic development and continue to fuel insurgency, terrorism, corruption and poor health, within Afghanistan, the southwest Asia region and further afield. The trafficking of illicit opiates contributes to the destabilization of Afghanistan and countries along the main trafficking routes. While there has been considerable research on opiate production in Afghanistan, there are few detailed studies on how opiate manufacture or trafficking occurs in Afghanistan, and no dedicated study on women’s involvement in these areas. In 2020, UNODC produced a study based on interviews with active male Afghan drug traffickers – Quchaqbar in Dari/Farsi – who were directly involved in the trafficking of opiates in Afghanistan and abroad. All of those interviewed in the 2020 study were men. Accessing women traffickers – or Quchaqbar zan in Dari- in the cultural environment of Afghanistan was challenging, and the initial assumption was that women had little role to play in the opiate trade, beyond cultivating and harvesting opium and anecdotal evidence of female drug mules. However, in the 2020 study, many male traffickers commented that Afghan women’s involvement in the opiate trade had increased in the five years from 2015 to 2020, and that women performed many roles in the business.

To better understand the role of Afghan women in opiate trade in Afghanistan the UNODC’s Afghan Opiate Trade Project, under the framework of CRIMJUST initiated the current study, based on the data gathered from nine interviews with Afghan female traffickers. The study investigates Afghan women's role and involvement in the drug trade, motivations for entering and remaining in the drug trade, the business model and drug trafficking networks.

Mapping criminal networks is essential to understanding the illicit opiate trade, both within Afghanistan and internationally

” – emphasized Alan Cole, the Chief of the Border Management Branch at the launch of the research study in Vienna.

According to the research study, Afghan women are involved in a wide range of roles within the illicit opiate trade, including trafficking outside Afghanistan and selling heroin to users. Having entered the drug trade for a combination of social and economic motives, the women remained involved mostly for financial reasons. They directly managed the income earned from the opiate trade and used it primarily on family expenses and savings. Often working within family-based drug trafficking organisations, the women remained at the periphery of the wider organization due to social restrictions and cultural norms. Some women had left the opiate trade following the return to power by the Taliban – conversely, some women reported that trafficking had become easier.
"O

piates are cultivated in areas where there is less gender equality

", stated Ms. Alison Davidian, Country Representative for UN Women in Afghanistan. She stressed that the broader cultural context must be taken into consideration when designing policies targeting women in Afghanistan.

This is the first study to understand opiate trafficking from the perspective of Afghan women. Their testimonies provide novel insight into an otherwise hidden population. Not only does this report contribute to wider research on the topic of women’s involvement in drug trafficking, it also provides an evidence base upon which targeted interventions to help women leave the opiate trade can be developed.

Afghan women and the opiate trade

8th December, 13.30 to 15.30 CET at the Vienna International Centre and online

Interpretation in French, Russian and Spanish will be available

The UNODC Synthetic Drug Strategy 2021-2025 was formally launched in November 2021, centered around four “spheres of action” (multilateralism and international cooperation, early warning on emerging synthetic drug threats, science-informed health responses, and counter-narcotic interventions).

To enhance and sustain meaningful civil society engagement in the context of the UNODC Synthetic Drug Strategy, UNODC together with The Alliance and the Vienna NGO Committee (VNGOC) are organizing an initial 

consultation with relevant civil society stakeholders on 8th December 2022

, in the margins of the reconvened meeting of the 65th CND. The meeting will serve as an initial “kick-off” to develop substantiative civil society expert groups that can play a consultative role in the implementation, adaptation and evaluation of the Synthetic Drug Strategy.

The consultation will be held in a hybrid format (online and in person) on

 8th December, 1.30PM (CET) to 3.30PM (CET). Civil society representatives interested in contributing are invited to participate.


Interpretation in FR, RU and ES will be provided.

Interested civil society representatives are invited to 

Note: Kindly note that no funding will be provided for travel costs. Interested participants wishing to attend in-person are expected to cover all associated costs.

Engaging with the UNODC Synthetic Drug Strategy - Civil society consultation

These days, Eris Nyx is dressing up like she’s in the Vietnam War.

“I have a full tiger stripe war thing,” she says, referring to the camouflage patterns used during the conflict, “because it’s a war zone out there, and nobody is coming to help us.”

People continue to die around her — people she knows — of drug overdoses, as Canada remains in the grips of a deadly toxic drug crisis that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands.

It’s a crisis that has been blamed on a war — the war on drugs — fuelled by what policy experts and people who use drugs say is a mix of prohibition, 

In the face of what she calls government foot-dragging on providing the tools needed to stem the tide of death, Nyx and others are taking action, recently launching a fulfilment centre and compassion club in Vancouver, which procures, tests, repackages, and distributes drugs to people at high risk of overdose.

Canada: Can drug users' lives be saved by giving them uncontaminated heroin and cocaine?

To better understand the role of Afghan women in opiate trade in Afghanistan and following the publication of the “Voices of Quchaqbar” report, the UNODC’s Afghan Opiate Trade Project, under the framework of CRIMJUST initiated the current study, utilising a similar methodology to interview Afghan women. This study investigates Afghan women's role and involvement in the drug trade, motivations for entering and remaining in the drug trade, the business model and drug trafficking networks.

Mr. Michael Osman, Head, Afghan Opiate Trade Project, Border Management Branch, 

Mr. Alan Cole, Chief, Border Management Branch, UNODC

Representative, Research and Trend Analysis Branch, UNODC (tbc) 

Representative UNODC Country Office for Afghanistan - tbc • Representative UNODC Gender Team – tbc 

Introduction, overview of the study and presentation of the key findings 

Mr. Michael Osman, Head, Afghan Opiate Trade Project, Border Management Branch, UNODC 

Ms. Monika Roszkowska, Research Officer, Afghan Opiate Trade Project, Border Management Branch, UNODC

Launch of the UNODC report on Afghan women and the opiate trade

Organizers of a Vancouver compassion club say they will continue to distribute tested cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine despite a rejection from Health Canada, calling it the only way to save lives in the face of a toxic drug supply.

Eris Nyx, co-founder of the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) — a collective of advocacy groups working to ensure a safe supply of drugs — said regulating the illicit supply is the answer to stopping drug toxicity deaths, which have topped 10,000 in British Columbia since the province declared a public health emergency more than six years ago.

"These people are our friends, our community members, people we love, people we care about very deeply and we're losing them every day. And the driving cause of these deaths is the deregulated and unpredictable illicit drug market,'' Nyx said Wednesday.

Nyx spoke at a news conference marking International Overdose Awareness Day, saying the groups are also seeking a judicial review of the Health Canada decision, on the basis that it didn't consider charter rights to life and equality.

DULF and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users requested the temporary Criminal Code exemption from Health Canada to operate a compassion club model for hard drugs last year. It was rejected July 29.

Nonetheless, Nyx said the Cocaine, Heroin and Methamphetamine Compassion Club and Fulfilment Centre has operated for one month, distributing 201 grams of drugs with no overdoses or deaths.

Vancouver club will continue to distribute hard drugs in bid to save lives, despite Health Canada rejection

Across the world, the state of environmental stress is unprecedented. As scholarship and activism on ‘environmental justice’ point out, poorer and marginalised communities face particular exposure to environmental harms.

This holds especially true for populations in the Global South, including Myanmar. The role of opium cultivation in relation to these environmental stresses is an underexplored terrain. Yet, as this new TNI report argues, drugs, as well as the policy responses to them, are an environmental crisis in Myanmar as well as other countries where opium poppy, coca bush and cannabis plants are cultivated.

Across the world, the state of environmental stress is unprecedented. This includes major threats to the lands, soils, waters, forests, and oceans that make up our ecosystems and biodiverse nature. Cutting across all of this are the unfolding effects of climate change and global heating. All of these developments will continue to have dramatic impacts on both people and planet. These impacts are however not evenly distributed. As scholarship and activism on ‘environmental justice’ points out, poorer and marginalised communities, often differentiated along class, gender and racial lines, face particular exposure to environmental harms. This holds particularly true for populations in the Global South.

The role of illicit drugs in relation to these environmental stresses is an underexplored terrain. Yet, as this report will argue, drugs, as well as the policy responses to them, are an environmental issue. This disconnect between drug and environmental policy is the result largely of the institutional compartmentalisation of the issue of drugs into the domain of crime and law enforcement with little outreach to other spheres related to the environment or sustainable development. References to the environment within drug policy have as such remained sparse and limited in scope.

This is slowly changing. A resolution on alternative development adopted by the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) - the central drug policy-making body within the UN system - in March this year gave special attention to environmental protection, encouraging “Member States to examine and address, within the efforts of alternative development, the harmful impact of the illicit cultivation of crops used for the production of narcotic drugs on the environment, which may lead to deforestation and the pollution of soil and water, and to seize the opportunities offered by alternative development with regard to the conservation and sustainable use of the environment and the protection of biodiversity”. And for the first time this year, the 2022 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) World Drug Report will include a special booklet on the connection between illicit drugs and the environment. This follows on from an increasing number of official side-events that have been organised in recent years at the CND in Vienna on the issue of drugs and the environment.

TNI’s latest report ‘Prohibited Plants. Environmental Justice in Drug Policy’ explores, among other things, the environmental dynamics associated with opium poppy cultivation in the two regions with which it is most associated: Myanmar (as part of the so-called ‘Golden Triangle’ along with Thailand and Laos) and Afghanistan. The two cases make for an interesting contrast. While in the case of Myanmar, more traditional forms of cultivation practised by upland populations and ethnic minority groups as part of mobile agricultural systems are examined, in Afghanistan the environmental implications of the introduction of new ‘green’ technologies in the form of solar-powered deepwater wells for long-term sustainability are discussed. In both cases, opium cultivation has continued, if not dramatically increased, against the backdrop of a series of bans and, with few exceptions, failed crop-substitution and alternative development (AD) programmes.

Opium cultivation and environmental justice in Myanmar

The Australian government recently donated $40 million to assist with alleviating the food security and economic crises unfolding in Afghanistan, while reiterating its condemnation of the Taliban’s repression and exclusion of women and girls from education and work. Many nations have withheld donations because of these violations of human rights—as well as the revenge executions and disappearances of ‘traitors’ who worked with US-led forces and the US-backed Afghan government or criticised Taliban policies—to avoid legitimising the Taliban’s rule.

The commitment to oppressing women is, however, evidently still more important to the Taliban leadership than basic food security, despite their having a front-row seat to watch the humanitarian crisis play out and affect all Afghan society, not just women.

Surely the international community knows this calculus by now. The most significant difference between the Taliban of the 2020s and 1990s seems to be that instead of banning the internet as part of their strategy to control the population, they are savvy about the potential for a curated social-media presence to affect international perceptions and promote disinformation domestically for political and security purposes.

Australia did the right thing in making its decision based on the immediate food security needs of Afghans. This is a hugely complex situation, and the Afghan people stand to suffer even more if the international community applies too much pressure on particular issues at particular times. Intersecting security issues also make it impossible for the international community to get it right—if that’s defined as finding an option that causes no harm.

Afghanistan’s opium problem requires a humanitarian solution

By Tony Duffin and Eugene McCann / The Journal

IT HAS BEEN a decade since a supervised facility for people to inject drugs less harmfully was first proposed for Dublin.

It has been almost five years since Supervised Injecting Facilities have been legal in Ireland. It is time one was opened.

Street-based injecting refers to the practice of injecting drugs in public or semi-public places. Street-based injecting is harmful. There are harms affecting the people who are injecting and also harms that affect the community where injecting occurs.

"A Supervised Injecting Facility is a type of Drug Consumption Room. Supervised Injecting Facilities focus on injecting drug use and seek to reduce harm through the supervision of people who inject illicit or unknown drugs in a more hygienic and less public environment than otherwise; the provision of sterile equipment; the provision of advice on safer injecting practise; intervening when an overdose occurs; and by referring people to other services, e.g. health, social, housing, legal, etc."

For many years, drug use in Dublin’s public spaces has been and continues to be, a matter of significant concern. For example, in 2005, the Lord Mayor’s Commission on Crime and Policing highlighted the public perception of the problem of public injecting in Dublin, “injecting in public places…a sight [which] causes distress to members of the public who feel threatened by such overt drug abuse on the streets…and a perception of lawlessness often ensues”.

In 2011 a public survey by Dublin City Council described ‘antisocial’ behaviour, including drug-related activities, as being the worst thing about Dublin. In that survey, there were over 400 mentions of drugs and drug use in the open responses.

"The persistence and significance of the problem over the last two decades suggest that existing policy responses have been ineffective in reducing associated drug-related harms."

Elsewhere, other public health-focused responses, such as Supervised Injecting Facilities, have been implemented successfully. But they have yet to be replicated in Ireland.

Opinion: Supervised drug injecting in Ireland - 10 years of advocacy, legislation and delays 

Online event co-sponsored by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Vienna NGO Committee on Drugs (VNGOC) and the International Association for Hospice and Palliative Care (IAHPC). Chairs of the Lancet Commission on Pain and Palliative Care and the Stanford-Lancet Commission on the North American Opioid Crisis will present the main findings of their reports, followed by a discussion on the way forward with civil society experts and representatives of the International Narcotics Control Board, the World Health Organization, and UNODC.

Date and time: Friday, April 29th at 3PM CEST (Vienna time).

Interpretation: Simultaneous interpretation in French, Russian and Spanish will be available.

The event is jointly organized by UNODC Civil Society Unit (CSU) and the Laboratory and Scientific Section in cooperation with the Vienna NGO Committee on Drugs (VNGOC) and the International Association for Hospice and Palliative Care (IAHPC).

Interpretation in French, Russian and Spanish will be available.

The event will be moderated by H.E. Ghislain d’Hoop, Ambassador of the Kingdom of Belgium and Chair of the 65th session of the Commission of Narcotic Drugs (CND) and Ms Mirella Dummar Frahi, Chief of the UNODC Civil Society Unit will give opening remarks.

The panelists are:

Dr Felicia Knaul, Chair, Lancet Commission on Pain and Palliative Care

Dr Keith Humphreys, Chair, Stanford-Lancet Commission on the North American Opioid Crisis

Ms Maria Goretti Ane, Lawyer, IDPC consultant and expert member of the framers of the model drug law for West Africa

Mr Justice Tettey, Chief, Laboratory and Scientific Section, UNODC

Dr Gilles Forte, Head, Special Projects, Access to Medicines and Health Products, WHO

Mark Colhoun, Secretary, International Narcotic Control Board (INCB)

Protecting public health and welfare through balanced opioid governance

Afghanistan is the world's biggest producer of poppies, the source of sap that is refined into heroin, and in recent years production and exports have only boomed.

"All Afghans are informed that from now on cultivation of poppy has been strictly prohibited across the country," said a decree issued by Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada.

The order was read out by government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid at a gathering of reporters, foreign diplomats and Taliban officials.

"If anyone violates the decree the crop will be destroyed immediately and the violator will be treated according to the sharia law," it added.

It is not the first time the fundamentalist group has vowed to outlaw the trade. Production was banned in 2000, just before the group was overthrown by US-led forces in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

During their 20-year insurgency against foreign forces, the Taliban heavily taxed farmers cultivating the crop in areas under their control, experts have said.

It became a key resource for the group to generate funds.

Poppy farmer Abdul Rahman told AFP that Sunday's ban was a blow to his livelihood.

"We have taken loans to cultivate this... If these crops are destroyed our income will be gone," said Rahman, who is from the southern province of Kandahar -- the Taliban's de facto power centre.

Opium & opioids